Can you steal
what is yours?
The
rhetorical question at the center of this seventh episode, the best of all.
Majka (Maja Barelkowska) is the real mother of Ania (Katarzyna Piwowarczyk), a
little girl to whom the first is introduced as her sister, raised by her
mother, Ewa (Anna Polony). No longer bearing this false situation, Majka hides
the child at the bend of an exit. She goes to Ania's real father, Wojtek
(Bogusław Linda), a former teacher with a desire to write, today a craftsman
making soft toys (from her teddy bears to the costumed show Ania attended, the
film is a testimony of the great tradition of children's entertainment at work
in Slavic cultures). Having made Majka pregnant while she was his pupil, at
sixteen, he had accepted anonymity, not to claim paternity, while the mother
had ceded official maternity to hers, the grandmother hiding her desire to
raise another child behind a concern about the parenting skills of her
daughter. The segment’s first mark of success is its ability to excite a case
that has already arisen, for characters who each know the situation to expose
themselves to each others for the benefit of the audience. After a few hours,
Majka announces the kidnapping to her parents. It is clear that she will not
return the child to them (she does not give her mother time on the phone to
accept once and for all her proposal to officially re-establish the situation),
but what she does to do, it remains uncertain. Fleeing from Wojtek (the film
suggesting that he would have been, would still be, the most able to take care
of Ania), he still has the possibility of crossing the border or (which his
emotional imbalance does not make implausible) to get rid of her daughter, a
solution she considers while approaching a river.
There is
therefore literal theft (an abduction) and thematic (a spoliation). Refusing
Manichaeism, Kieślowski does not claim that the authentic mother would be in
full capacity to educate a child on her own. The fact remains that the way in
which she saw herself dispossessed of her offspring is particularly unfair.
This not for her alone, but for another who suffers from it (a girl sleeping in
a panic-stricken sleep, having poor bladder control, not understanding that she
has to call her sister "mom" overnight). Psychic violence with
obvious atrocity is inflicted on him. She is the witness of failing adults to
say the least, caught up in her even in dilemmas and altercations that she is
unable to integrate, neither intellectually nor emotionally. Accompanied by a
composition inspired by Zbigniew Preisner, their escape, no matter how
explainable the reasons, cannot lead to an optimal solution, a place of
appeasement, of rediscovered security. There is no bond of integrity to
reconnect with. By this aberrant case but in a banal sense (the
mother-daughters robbed of their child by their parents are not a rarity), the
episode points to a lack of integrity affecting not only relatives (complicit
silence of the grandfather, resigned cowardice of the father) but Polish
society more generally. Systematic corruption is at work. One rings the
doorbell at an influential notable in the early hours of the morning to request
a service as a last hope. The Flaubert read in her spare time by a ticket
office in a country station indicates from what social background this little
employee initially came (and therefore lets one guess the reasons which made
her occupy an off-center, discredited and boring position). A society of
falsehood, of the exchange of good manners, of contempt for intelligence and
rectitude. The last shot returns, in a stupefied face, to the one, however the
most concerned, that no one ever consults. The question then arises which the
protagonists dispense with: can we own a person?
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